William Trevor, Spare Chronicler of Diminished Lives

The great Anglo-Irish writer William Trevor, who died on Sunday at 88, was a late bloomer.

He didn’t start writing until he was in his early 30s, after failing to make a living as a sculptor and woodcarver. He quickly made up for lost time and went on to publish nearly 20 novels and more than a thousand pages’ worth of short stories, which will almost certainly be his lasting legacy. (In England, he was also well-known for his television screenplays and adaptations, including one of Dickens’s “The Old Curiosity Shop.”)

He was mostly self-taught, and all of his writing retained a kind of sculptural solidity, spare and well polished. There were no metaphors, no Nabokovian special effects, no authorial introspection. Mr. Trevor seldom used the first person, or even the limited third person that confines itself to the inside of a single character’s head. He was an old-fashioned, omniscient author, a storyteller. One of his stories even begins, “Once upon a time.”

His style was so pure and uncluttered that when he first came on the scene, in the mid-1960s, it almost seemed radical.

“The very obvious sort of experimental writing is not really more experimental than that of a conventional writer like myself,” he said in a Paris Review interview in 1989. “I experiment all the time but the experiments are hidden.”

What interested Mr. Trevor was not himself but his world, or two worlds, really: England and Ireland, though he never fully belonged to either. He wasn’t, like Yeats or Wilde, born to the Anglo-Irish gentry. His family was middle-class, and he grew up a Protestant in the Catholic south of Ireland, where he was, inevitably, an outsider.

He lived most of his adult life in London and then Devon, but his writing toggles back and forth between the countries, with roughly half his fiction set in each. Mr. Trevor’s England in many ways resembles that of V. S. Pritchett, his only real rival as a master of the British short story. There are the same lonely bed-sits, rundown boardinghouses, cheerless cafes.

The difference is that Mr. Pritchett’s world is enlivened by his cheerful embrace of eccentricity, while Mr. Trevor’s London is drabber, sadder, a place of widows and widowers, blighted romances, unraveling relationships. It would be a depressing place to read about if Mr. Trevor didn’t describe it with such care and fondness. He never pitied or condescended to his solitaries; instead, he loved and understood them.

Mr. Trevor’s Ireland is just as lonely, or even lonelier, than his England, and additionally burdened by the weight of the past, which is always tugging his characters backward. There are occasional topical references in these stories, snatches of pop songs or allusions to the Troubles, but many of them take place in a changeless, timeless Ireland where ancient patterns and identities are always asserting themselves.

“The Ballroom of Romance,” for example, one of Mr. Trevor’s most famous stories, is about a rural Irish dance hall where solitary men and women, most pushing middle age, go every Saturday night in hope of finding love, and leave with the certainty that nothing will ever change.

The title characters of “The Hill Bachelors” are Irish farmers tied to the land by an inheritance of guilt and obligation. They yearn to be married, but the available women all want to live in town, not in some dreary cottage with a turf fire.

So many of the stories are set in this sort of eternal past that it’s often hard to tell a story written in the ’60s, say, from one written in the ’80s or ’90s. He found his voice right at the beginning, and it didn’t evolve much, except for getting a little darker.

His early work, especially his first novel, “The Old Boys,” about a feud among some boarding school alumni, is sometimes riotously funny. Humor in the later stories, while seldom entirely absent, is slyer and quicker. A hallmark of all of them is their economy. Mr. Trevor was one of those writers who would rather leave things out than put them in, and as John Updike once said of him, “his situations and characters are blocked in as quickly as a bricklayer lays a walk.”

Here, for example, is the beginning of a story called “The Piano Tuner’s Wives,” which lays everything out — two marriages and an entire social world — in just a couple of brisk sentences:

“Violet married the piano tuner when he was a young man. Belle married him when he was old. There was a little more to it than that, because in choosing Violet to be his wife the piano tuner had rejected Belle, which was something everyone remembered when the second wedding was announced.”

Like so many Trevor stories, this one is about loss and diminishment but ends with a moment of wry understanding and forgiveness: “Belle would win in the end because the living always do. And that seemed fair also, since Violet had won in the beginning and had had the better years.”

Writing like this is the real source of Mr. Trevor’s greatness: at once familiar and magisterial, polished and unassuming, every word clicking into place as surely as a key fitting a lock.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Fond Chronicler of Diminished Lives. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe